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The demise of the Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale was a sad event in the history of an institution that dated to 1836. The founders and early managers were mainly women who sought to do God's will by caring for abused and forsaken black children. They took on this mammoth effort at a time when African Americans were shunned by society. Oppressive laws prohibited much of their daily contact with their fellow white residents unless they were in a subordinate position. The white women, many of whom personally abhorred the horrors of slavery and who wished to do God's will by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, did so at the risk of “unsexing” themselves in the eyes of their less Christian contemporaries. Men and women of means such as John Jacob Astor, R. H. Macy, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., William Jay, Anna Jay, Caroline Stokes, and many others contributed generously to the betterment of the orphan black child.

The Colored Orphan Asylum (COA) trustees were determined that their new home in Riverdale would be modeled on the cottage system, which was then in vogue. The New York Juvenile Asylum had embraced the cottage system in 1897 as a way to enforce discipline and “to stimulate the intimacy of family life.” The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Orphan Asylum in nearby Westchester County, New York, preferred young cottage mothers who had pedagogical training or kindergarten training. The Carson and Ellis College in Philadelphia provided white girls with a complete unit of family life, with kitchen, dining room, and common room. However, not all agreed that the housemothers should be African Americans. Mrs. J. L. Chapin questioned the advisability of employing black housemothers. Despite the initial inconveniences, at the end of 1907 the ladies were pleased with the cottage system, which represented a return to the early days of the asylum and its emphasis on a closely knit home environment.

The educational report for 1937 was a mixed one. The declining population at Riverdale led to the termination of the kindergarten class. The continued emphasis on vocational training made little sense in an era when activists had taken to the streets to open up Harlem's workforce to all professions. One question was why they insisted on offering vocational classes when these skills offered limited marketable opportunities. The skimpy record indicates that despite the institution's aloofness from Harlem, community leaders sought to make the children happy. The Colored Orphan Asylum's challenge was to provide adequate resources for children still at Riverdale and for those who were boarded out with families. The boarding home committee faced difficulty in finding adequate foster care homes, both because most blacks had low incomes and because the Negro sections in the greater New York City area offered “poor and inadequate housing condition.”

This chapter examines the early British and French efforts to procure war materiel from the United States and the positive influence of those negotiations on the development of Anglo-American collaboration. The account first establishes the intense anti-interventionist sentiment that set the conditions for the negotiations. The narrative outlines the initial confused nature of the British and French purchasing commissions. Using the development and purchase of aircraft as the primary case study, the chapter outlines the fits, starts, and frictions that plagued the initial supply negotiations. Although shared mutual interests facilitated collaboration, the fact that Anglo-French purchase orders developed the U.S. industrial base and contributed to lowering unemployment still lingering from the Great Depression helped as well. Over time, the negotiations slowly intertwined the two powers’ industrial efforts, promoting an increasing spiral of collaboration that included war planning based on allocation decisions.

This chapter discusses Latouche’s early education. This includes his early artistic interests, and his years at John Marshall High School, during which time he wrote extensively for the school newspaper and acted in school plays. During these early years, he also partook in community theater in Richmond, making a name for himself as an actor. After graduating high school, he attended the Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx, where he pursued similar activities. Entering Columbia University on scholarship, he distinguished himself as a critic and poet, winning several prestigious awards. But after the success of his columbia Varsity Show, Flair-Flair, for which he wrote the book and lyrics and even some of the music, he dropped out of Columbia to pursue a career on Broadway.